Struggle against ignorance and indifference, says Senate speaker

(ANSA) - Rome, February 10 - Italian Senate Speaker Pietro
Grasso said on Monday that everyone must work to ensure that
"such horrors" as the Foibe massacres are never repeated.
Grasso was speaking at an event to commemorate the thousands
of Italians killed by Yugoslav strongman Marshal Josef Tito's
partisans by being thrown alive or dead into gorges called foibe
in northwestern Yugoslavia at the end of WWII.
Grasso said that remembering was "a duty" and that "it
serves as a warning for all of us to make sure that we prevent
ignorance and indifference from getting the upper hand", which
would result in such horrors being repeated.

"This is a duty towards the survivors, the victims'
families," he said, calling the Foibe killings "one of the
saddest chapters in our history".
In addressing the youths who took part in the competition
"Italian Literature of Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia", the areas in
which the killings of the local Italian population occurred, he
said that he was confident that the study they had engaged in as
part of the project had helped them to better understand the
past and accept others.
The Italian Parliament instituted the Day of Remembrance ten
years ago, he noted, on the anniversary of the 1947 peace treaty
between Italy and the Allied Powers.
As many as 15,000 Italians were tortured or killed by
Yugoslav communists who occupied the Istrian peninsula during
the last two years of the war.

Many of the victims were thrown into the narrow mountain
gorges during anti-Fascist uprisings in the area.

The exact number of victims of these atrocities is unknown,
in part because Tito's forces destroyed local population records
to cover up their crimes.

The Foibe atrocities were for decades a divisive issue in
Italian politics, with right-wing politicians accusing the Left
of trying to airbrush the massacres out of history and focusing
exclusively on the crimes committed by Benito Mussolini's
Fascist regime.

Grasso went on to say that the Yugoslav occupation, "which
in Trieste lasted 45 days, was not only the cause of the foibe
and deportation to Yugoslav concentration camps", but that it
had also forced many people to leave their homes.

"The Italian population from that area was almost entirely
wiped out" and the memory of it had long been neglected, he
said.